push email on an iPhone - come on gmail ;)

As per my previous post, my posts are out of whack as I am behind on them. To summarise one of them.. I got an iPhone and it is the best convergence device I have ever had. It really does replace my mp3 player,PDA and phone.

One of the major reasons for buying the iPhone was its ability to push my work email out to me immediately (using our Microsoft Exchange servers). It works great (though it does not sync my Outlook tasks for some reason?!). One of the issues I had when I used this push email functionality on my Windows Mobile phone was how it worked with my personal email/calendar/contacts. I could use Windows Live’s services but it is slow, clunky and therefore impossible to really use productively. So I had to make do combining my work and personal information and using the mobile browser for email.

On the iPhone, Apple have released MobileMe to provide a solution to this. It looks like an interesting solution which allows me to maintain a separate personal and work contact list and have upto date email/contacts/calendars on the move for my personal stuff. Despite the marketing speak it is not push ala Microsoft Exchange but pulling contacts and the calendar every minute so it is so near instantaneous - not that that really matters to most people (there are mutterings about email being pull as well but I can’t confirm that - anyone know what the reality is on this?). Anyhow, the real problem for me is that it requires me to use a mobileme email account (someone@me.com). I use my own personal domain for emails running on Google’s Apps so switching accounts really isn’t an option. Maybe one day they will offer a similar service to Google. Not sure it would be a priority for them.

There is push email on Yahoo but again similar to MobileMe, I have to use their email addresses and the personal contact list merges with your work one. I’m not sure if thats better or worse than having it separate. I suppose the most important thing is that it does not sync back to my work computer. There does not seem to be any sort of calendar sync.

So as I am already using Google, the obvious solution would be Gmail push on the iPhone. Google released push email on Helio (a US mobile carrier) a while back but there is currently nothing for the iPhone, so right now I am stuck either syncing via IMAP or using my mobile browser. Of course that also means no personal contacts list integrated with the phone or a calendar. It looks like there is possible a timeline to this happening though it isn’t till September at least. I wonder though if it will allow a separate personal contact list or will Apple keep that functionality to itself.

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I have seen a couple of occasions where it seems to me that certain companies just cannot count!

Today whilst playing catchup on my rss feed, I noticed that my Google Reader all items count was awfully high. A quick total up of unread items by feed gave 458.. all items is 548! A more obvious mistake was in Pownce. There it said I had 5 friends whereas I have 6 listed?!

Surely this is something simple to get right?

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There has been a bunch of rumours that Plaxo will get bought by Google or Facebook. But I think Microsoft would be a much better fit? Plaxo has great integration with Microsoft Outlook - which fits well with Microsoft’s connected applications strategy, it has a large base of registered users and could add to Microsoft’s online portfolio. It would also allow for Outlook to become more “socially” aware and take advantage of the email social network. Of course Yahoo has a social network so maybe this is only a go-er if the Yahoo deal falls through.

I do not see any positives though for Facebook buying it or for that matter Google really. What am I missing?

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Nicholas Deleon talks about the new Unity venture being pursued by Google and a bunch of other companies which will increase the bandwidth capacity across the Pacific. He says:

“One quick thought I had: how often do you, average American Internet user, connect to Asian servers? Unless YouTube or Wikipedia has servers there, it does seem weird to me to suggest all this Trans-Pacific Internet activity when I’m mainly browsing CNN and Drudge and other U.S.-based sites.”

I think Nicholas misses the point.

If this were about the average user using the internet, then the communications companies would be building this pipeline on their own. Google’s problem is that it has so much information. I am betting a lot of that information gets moved around all of its servers globally, whether that is Google pushing data out from their US servers or vice versa. The amount of information they have is increasing exponentially and will continue to grow.. so now they need to work with the telecoms companies to sate their own need for bandwidth. Not just users.

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Reading Dylan Fuller’s post on AOL CEO, Andy Fulco, talking tough:

“I hope they beat each other’s brains out over search and leave the display market to us,” he said to the Interactive Advertising Bureau annual conference. “I think it’s a mistake. But I think Napoleon said never interrupt your enemy when they’re in the middle of making a mistake.”

Dylan is right there are some cool products being talked about. But this is how to lose users.. go along to the Xdrive website and click the link for more info about their new ultra cool Xdrive Desktop Lite app - a 404 error.

So I download it instead.

I already have an account.. I can log in via the website just fine - but I just get a login error via the Xdrive Lite app. I know it is in beta still but surely they can do better than this?

AOL are lucky Google’s Gdrive is not out yet and Microsoft’s version (Skydrive) is currently unusable - you have to select individual files to upload to their online storage - thats great when I have a few thousand files.

[update] ah - they fixed the link now and updated the front page design entirely - much better, there is also no advert either on the front page interestingly. For me though, the product still just doesn’t seem to work as advertised. I selected a directory and dragged it to the app. It should sync right? Well the list of transfers shows all the files but after it syncs some files, it just seems to get stuck - files are no longer being uploaded. I don’t know why.. some form of error message of status bar would be useful! Incidentally this was the same issue 4 months ago when I last tried Xdrive

Popularity: 8% [?]